Coconuts, crabs and kayaks

Before I get distracted writing about other stuff, lets talk about the MJO for a second.

In the above plot the current state of the MJO is in phase 5 and you can see the strength is diminishing by how the line has started to move back towards the center. The farther away the line is from the center circle means the MJO is stronger and more coherent. Phase 5 coincides with enhanced rainfall over Indonesia and more suppressed rainfall over the Indian Ocean where I am.

You can see this somewhat in the hovmueller diagram above. The most current time is at the bottom of the plot. The DYNAMO array is around 72 E which is on the edge of those orange colors. The orange/red colors mean there is less convective activity and less rainfall.

This third plot shows this even better. Diego Garcia is right at the eastern edge of the red blob. The other cool thing about this particular plot is that the blue area, which is the wet/rainy part of the MJO, resembles a pattern that was found in a famous paper by Adrian Gill. This is sometimes referred to as a coupled Rossby/Kelvin wave pattern, with a kelvin wave to the east and a vortex on each side of the equator to the west that makes up the Rossby wave component. If you were to filter this same data for Kelvin and Rossby waves you would see a Kelvin wave around 150 E and a Rossby wave signal around 100 E. Here's an image of the steady-state response to an equatorial heating in that Gill model:

So enough about that. Last week Steph and I, along with our friend Jesus, went to the old coconut plantation to check out the old buildings. It reminded even more of the set of the show "Lost", because these buildings were in use in the early 70's. Most of the buildings were barely there, just a few concrete walls.

Here's our friend Jesus, who works with the NOAA P3 plane for DYNAMO. His main job is as a scientist at UC Irvine.

Some walls had this cool look to them. My first though was that it was some type of rock, but after seeing this same thing out on the reef while snorkeling, I'm pretty sure its corral.

I think this next picture is a building of a prison. It's hard to tell what anything was used for, but this one had three cells with bars on the windows and heavy steel doors.

 Here's what I assume is the plantation manager's house. There was also a church next to this other buildings labeled stuff like "bakery" and "post office".

This is my favorite picture that I took. This is an old stove that is in a building directly behind the main house, but not attached to it.

Here's a coconut crab. This wasn't even the biggest one we saw. When they are small they live in shells like hermit crabs, which is probably why their legs seem to be set farther forward on their body compared to other crabs I've seen here. These things were EVERYWHERE at the plantation. You had watch where you were stepping. Most of the land crabs move very fast, but these things move very slow and awkwardly. On the way back from the plantation these things were scattered on the road. There was one about every 10 feet or so. I managed to not kill a single crab with the car! It was hard though, because unlike the other types of crabs that would scuttle away, these things would walk towards the truck as we were driving at them!!!

Here's a cool plane wreck near the plantation.

And here's the three of us watching the sunset. 

I'd say this was a pretty good day.

One more thing, Steph and I did a doubles kayak race yesterday. They would do four sets of four boats at a time. We came in first out of the four boats, but we came in fourth or fifth over all. We started out behind the other boats, but in the end we were able to recover. I strapped my GoPro camera to head to capture our victory. You can watch the video here on YouTube.